One of the things that may irritate a post structuralist reader about Auden is that he delights in “knowing” things-even those things which are ugly and disastrous to know. For example, his greatest praise of old masters: “About suffering, the old masters they were never wrong.” Auden likes being right. He likes being elegant. He…

The time has come to reveal (I think) the source (for those who don’t already know) of The The Poetry’s name, namely, “The Man on the Dump” by Wallace Stevens. is a link to the full text. Considering this, I wrote a little blurb to explain what this virtual forum is/might be. Here that is: ~ The The Poetry Blog takes its name from Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man on the Dump,” which ends with a question and an answer: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” The The is a forum for ideas on poetry and the poetic aspects of fiction, non-fiction, music, visual art, film, and “the things / That are on the dump (azaleas and so on) / And those that will be (azaleas and so on).” Our contributors are writers, readers, artists, critics and so on. Our readers are writers, readers, artists, [...]

<> Concerning all the recent discussions about memory, recitation, etc, I thought I would try it in my own way. I should disclose that I never recite my own poems from memory at readings. I think it is corny, weird, it makes me uncomfortable, and frankly, to spend that much time memorizing your own work is kind of sick. <> I want to rebel against my own ideas. <> I tried to write a poem entirely in my head and memorize it. I would never write it down. All editing would take place in my head. Line for line. The entire building and reconstruction could only exist abstractly. No writing as an aid. I would memorize the final poem. I would recite the poem and that is how it could live. <> This is how it went: First I had a few lines, but I could only get at it [...]

A Green Crab’s Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like– though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled…

So there’s always this double duty, neither to make the best the enemy of the good, nor to make the good the enemy of the best. Scylla and Charybdis. The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing the right thing is steering between two equally dangerous opposite bad things. Do you remember that Eliot was billed as giving a talk on ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and he’d realized that they’d simply misunderstood. That is, when he was asked what he was going to talk about, he’d said that these things were always a matter of Scylla and Charybdis and so forth, and this became the title of the talk so that we got a talk on this subject because they’d slightly misunderstood what he was saying. But it’s true to him. And Samuel [...]

Apologies for the pseudo self-promotion — if you’re free this evening, 8pm, come to CPR – Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Ave (Brooklyn) for Projection: featuring Star Black, Stephen Motika, Brenda Shaughnessy and Danniel Schoonebeek

I’m sitting up in bed, or on the couch, as it were, where I have been trying to sleep off the slew of vodka-and-tonics I downed last night at our reading here in Portland. Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just , and I read at . Happily I had the chance to meet and fraternize with thethe’s own . Happily too I have had the chance to experience a temperate spring. In my new adopted home we have a desert spring, which is an entirely different beast. Anyway, it’s been good to see green grass against mud and cherry trees in blossom. All of this reminds me of the wonderful lineage of cold muddy spring poems. There’s ‘Spring and All’ By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the waste [...]

comments on : Journalistic standards have changed so drastically that, when I took the podium at the film circle’s dinner and quoted Pauline Kael’s 1974 alarm, “Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising,” the gala’s audience responded with an audible hush—not applause. Over recent years, film journalism has—perhaps unconsciously—been considered a part of the film industry and expected to be a partner in Hollywood’s commercial system. Look at the increased prevalence of on-television reviewing dedicated to dispensing consumer advice, and of magazine and newspaper features linked only to current releases, or to the Oscar campaign, as if Hollywood’s business was everybody’s business. Critics are no longer respected as individual thinkers, only as adjuncts to advertising. We are not. And we should not be. Criticism needs to be reassessed with this clear understanding: We judge movies because we know movies, and our knowledge is based on learning and [...]

Ben Luzzatto’s THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED (UDP, 2010) is one of those rare artifacts that transfers its own actual magic—and it is real magic—until the possessed begins to lift a bit toward the sky. Ugly Duckling Presse has been summed up quite well as “a publishing collective specializing in experimental poetry and new editions of forgotten textual artist, producing lovely, cheeky books by authors you’ve probably never heard of but your grandchildren will likely read in college…a nesting ground for swans of the avant-garde poetry scene.” It’s true that I do feel personally attached to many titles UDP has produced (such as or ). THEORY is the most recent in its Dossier Series, which produced the wonderfully heady though deadly pretentious , and soon will bring out Dottie Lasky’s . When I first held this particular book though, I do what I do with most books, hold it open [...]

A. People talking without speaking People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share… -Paul Simon Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds…. -Vladimir Nabokov To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book never would have been written. -Philip K. Dick, dedication page from The Man in the High Castle B. If you place two or more people in a lobby, they will produce words that string together discussions regarding recent changes in weather. If you put one person in a lobby, he or she will hum a tune no one–not even he or she–knows, atonally and incessantly. C. This is a cat named Silence. He meows at the door as I write this. Silence on "Silence" by John Cage In the Brooklyn apartment where Silence lives, a man came to look at a room for [...]

I’ve decided to change my strategy for blogging through Grossman. Not only is it almost impossible to try and successfully capture the first part of the book in any systematic way (the conversation shifts too rapidly and it’s almost maddening to trace any idea), but the second part is so lovely and systematically broken down, that I keep gravitating toward it. So I’ll leave the first part of the book for those of you who desire to read it (very much worth it). Instead I’ll be blogging through Grossman’s “Summa Lyrica,” which is the second part of The Sighted Singer. Grossman begins his Summa by speaking about immortality: The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of will….The limits of the autonomy of the will discovered in poetry are death and the barriers against the access to other consciousnesses….The [...]



Stomach Teeth remain but lips do not. A flattened pouch filled With a jackal-headed god’s Crumbs, a steady and tasteless Nourishing, until again the Lips burn, hungry for fowl In the infinite field of reeds. Lungs Tree dismantled. One half On top the other, losing pink Quickly. A baboon’s snout Blows the new air of a god Inside and during the rise Twin sponge-roots relearn To expand, contract, expand. Intestines The longest road of the body Is watched by a hawk-faced god Who flies the Nile’s length In two wing-beats, collects Water in his beak and returns The river’s still blue coolness To the driest coil of flesh. Liver The usefulness of what’s left Behind—blessed by the hands of A god with a human face, wide-eyed And mindful. Four parts, four winds Stilled, the kind of silence needed To end and begin. To make venom Essential, to warm again the [...]

Below are some candid photos I’ve taken of Poetryland’s Personalities. “One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes… Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.” Mark Strand, Star Black & John Ashbery Mark Strand John Ashbery & David Lehman Harold Bloom Timothy Donnelly Richard Howard Christian Hawkey & Dara Wier Christian Hawkey James Tate Ruth Stone Frank O’Hara’s grave Lucie Brock-Broido & Tree Swenson Paul Mariani anonymous poet Adam Zagajewski John Yau John Ashbery (iPhone wallpaper) Christopher Ricks Linda Gregg Hart [...]